


This love is like wildfire

by adara



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Derek Hale, Alternate Universe - Firefighters, Beta Scott, Bookstore Owner Stiles Stilinski, California Wildfire, Derek Hale Needs To Use His Words, Emissary Stiles Stilinski, Firefighter Derek Hale, Firefighter Stiles Stilinski, Firefighter Vernon Boyd, Idiots in Love, M/M, Mates Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Miscommunication, Oblivious Stiles Stilinski, Paramedic Scott McCall (Teen Wolf), Pre-Relationship, Spark Stiles Stilinski, The Pack Ships It, Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes Live, mentions of Scott - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:55:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22190665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adara/pseuds/adara
Summary: In which Stiles is a volunteer firefighter dealing with a fire that's creeping up on Beacon Hills and Derek and Stiles both realize they've been missing some important information over the years.
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 28
Kudos: 461





	This love is like wildfire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Swlfangirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Swlfangirl/gifts).



> This fic was written for swlfangirl for our friendiversary because I love and adore her. She is an absolute gem and I love her so much but I'm gonna be swamped in Feb so I'm posting this early.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am not a firefighter and I def didn't run this by any of my friends that are but in a fic about werewolves and magic, how realistic can we actually expect to be? This was not originally intended to be a firefighter fic but then it just wrote itself that way. 
> 
> Title and inspo for this fic from the [Seafret song "Wildfire"](https://youtu.be/cTfHUbffjr0)  
>  _You think you know all about it, then it seems you are wrong  
>  She hit it out of the park before it had even begun  
> I needed sunshine in the darkness burning out  
> Well now I know that I'm the fuel and she's the spark  
> We are bound to each other's hearts  
> Caught, torn and pulled apart  
> This love is like wildfire  
> And to my word now I'll be true  
> I can't stop this breaking loose  
> This love is like wildfire  
> Like wildfire_

“Jesus, fuck!” Stiles yells, throwing his helmet across the truck cab with a loud clunk and yanking his hood back and mask off with extreme prejudice. He’s fucking melting to death under the many layers of his turnout gear but melting to death is better than burning to death so he’ll deal. Doesn’t mean he can’t be pissy about it. 

He’s been out here for a week. It’s not that he doesn’t _want_ to be here, he signed on and went through all the training for a reason, he just wishes every year that he didn’t _have_ to be here. He wishes people weren’t fucking idiots, setting off massive wildfires with their stupid gender reveal explosions gone wrong when you can’t even tell a baby’s gender from a freaking ultrasound image. Did Smokey the Bear teach these people nothing? It fucking kills him that these fires are preventable and yet here he is seven days into trying to stop the spread of this fire on the outskirts of Beacon County from progressing any further. 

It’s been dry as fuck this summer and the preserve would go up quickly if it had the chance, Nemeton be damned. The fire doesn’t discriminate. He’d already done all that was within his power to reinforce the protections he’d been maintaining on the borders of Beacon Hills for the last decade but wildfires were a bit beyond the scope of threats his spark could help with. Deaton and Ms. Morrell had done what they could too but again, the fire doesn’t give a single fuck right now about what they’re trying to protect and druid magic has its own limits.

None of this should have to burn. People have lost their homes, acres of trees and wildlife have been decimated. For nothing. Fucking California wildfire season. 

Stiles should be at work right now not fighting a fire but alas, he won't have a work to go to if this fire spreads. Stiles is a bookseller and not a full-time firefighter. He owns a small, private bookstore in town specializing in collectibles and is a member of the volunteer fire department, not one of the paid companies, but he’s still been out here every day doing his damndest. They’d actually lost ground in the buffer zone today when they had hoped to be slowing it down and hopefully getting it fully down and out soon enough. It’s infuriating. 

He’s unclasping the harness over his turnout coat to swap out the oxygen tank when he feels it taken out of his hands. Lieutenant Hale is swapping out his tank for him with a single raised eyebrow and a head tilt in the direction Stiles’ helmet had been launched quietly expressing his judgment. The gorgeous career firefighter and his second, Boyd, must’ve just returned to the checkpoint for their shift today because they’re not looking nearly as haggard as Stiles is sure he is at this moment.

Stiles grunts a thanks before guzzling down the rest of his water bottle. Derek replaces the empty bottle with a fresh one that Boyd passes over from the cooler at his feet that has seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Stiles makes sure the rest of his kit is together and makes to head back out. Technically speaking, as a volunteer, his hours are capped and he probably should not be going out to the frontline again but that’s not stopping him. As pissed as he is that it's burning, he's even more pissed that it's gained ground on his watch.

He does not have time for Derek and his whole everything right now. He looks fit as hell in his tight shirt, turnout pants and boots overtop, jacket slung over his shoulder. He's unfairly gorgeous and Stiles is fairly certain he's a grimy looking gremlin right now and probably smells to high heaven. It was Derek's housefire years ago that had sparked Stiles's desire to join up with the VFD as soon as he’d been old enough. It was probably the same thing that had gotten Derek into it too, but they’ve never really sat down to discuss their firefighting roots like that. Outside of training, Stiles and Derek generally only see each other at fire shit shows like this one or supernatural shit shows. Neither situation leaves much room for small talk. 

Stiles reflects as he heads back into the thick of it that he'd been a sophomore in high school when Laura and Derek had come back to Beacon Hills after having lost their whole family to fire. A house fire that Stiles knows was arson and not the electrical fire it was documented as because there was clearly aconite-laced accelerant used and the family had been subdued and blocked up in the basement to suffer and die. His dad’s the sheriff now, he’s seen the files whether or not he was technically supposed to. He’d also seen the files on the “animal attack” that had claimed Laura’s life. His best friend Scott had found half of her body when they’d gone looking before they knew who it was and before they knew better than to just go running off into the woods. 

Derek had transferred into the Beacon County Fire Department from a Brooklyn-based NYFD company. Stiles learned this when he’d participated in the annual mock disaster drill the school did every prom season and people were gossiping, as they do. Stiles was surprised to see Derek had become a firefighter, given the trauma of what had happened to his family, but maybe it was a coping mechanism or a way to prevent the same thing from happening to other families. Who knows? Stiles wasn’t asking and he also wasn't complaining, Derek made a hot firefighter in his kit responding to the school drill and there was talk about him amongst the others at the volunteer firehouse during drills and shifts for weeks.

Stiles knew who he was already when Derek stopped them for trespassing in the woods looking for Scott’s inhaler. Stiles learned shortly thereafter that Derek Hale was also a werewolf. Between Stiles, Derek, and the small pack that Derek and Laura had made since returning home they managed to get Scott straightened out with the life changes resulting from the bite of the alpha who’d killed Laura, their Uncle Peter. Scott worked as a paramedic now, so he got to see Stiles, his mom, and the pack regularly enough, but Stiles had never really been pack. He showed up for training, for meetings, and for showdowns but he always felt like they all treated him differently.

Stiles was pack-adjacent. Stiles was the research guy. He's fine with that, he doesn't want the bite. This research role is how he came to own his bookshop anyway, he should be thankful. The public library didn’t have quite the kind of books he needed once he’d exhausted cataloging the Hale vault, but he quickly found the best way to get his hands on books of actual use was through the patchouli-scented new age shop in town. That had led him to their source of more useful tomes, a little shop owned by an elderly Polish woman who had been beyond tickled to converse in the mother tongue and the glint in her eye suggested she knew just why he needed the books he was requesting on the regular. 

He started working for her in college, alongside his volunteer shifts at the fire department and fighting off the monster of the month with Scott and the Hale pack. Genevieve had left him the store when she retired to Florida and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He loves his little store, loves research when it’s not life-or-death, loves consulting for other packs when they call or email the shop. It's a pretty sweet gig. He really does love it and is lucky to have fallen into it.

He also loves helping the families of Beacon Hills when he can make a fire call. Part of it is that Beacon County is large and the volunteer firehouses help protect their local communities in a more timely manner than if they had to depend on the county's career company, but part of it is also the rush of not knowing what you’re rolling up to and having to figure it out and facilitate everyone’s safety successfully. 

Yeah, sometimes it’s a stereotypical cat in a tree but sometimes it’s a toddler on a porch roof and a distraught parent, a chimichanga fire called in by neighbors who saw the smoke pouring out of the windows, a motor vehicle collision that requires extraction and fuel spill containment, frozen turkey fryer disasters every Thanksgiving, drunk frat bros who need saved from whatever dumb shit they got into that sounded funnier before somebody lost an eye. It was always something and Stiles loved being able to help with that stuff on the front end, helping with supernatural stuff on the back end, and helping with his spark however it could be applied.

What he didn't love was bullshit wildfires caused by idiots that caused massive damage and suffering. The smoke had already been blowing into town before the fire had reached its border. Parents and their kids were wearing masks to leave the house. Because of a preventable fire that they were having trouble containing. It's bullshit. Stiles is running low on patience and ideas.

***

The arrival of Derek’s crew seems to turn the tide. Maybe it's the fresh energy of people who hadn’t been dealing with the same shit for the last 12 hours, maybe it's the certainty with which they carry themselves onto the scene, maybe it was the extra water tankers that Jackson Whittemore’s father had personally paid to have brought in, but whatever it was the buffer zone grew larger as they beat back the fire.

“Derek, can you keep eyes off those last two tankers for like five minutes?” Stiles asked quietly from far enough that none of the others from his crew would hear but close enough that he knew Derek and Boyd would. 

Derek always seemed to know exactly where Stiles was when they were up against whatever, mutual aid fire calls included, so Stiles wasn’t surprised when he saw Derek still at his name and then nod once from where he was standing and not even facing him. 

“Thanks. I have an idea that just might work. Maybe ten minutes.” Stiles said heading the opposite direction that Derek and Boyd were.

Derek corralled the careers and the volunteers to the far side of the buffer, away from the tankers, to huddle up and debrief on the progress while Stiles made his way to the tankers and out of sight.

He’d already done what could be done to reinforce the protections of the preserve itself but he hadn’t had an opportunity to try anything with the water yet. There weren’t hydrants out here and all the hydrants in town already had protective rune configurations emblazoned on them that bolstered the firefighters’ work on scene when needed. Stiles thinks if he can do the same to these tankers, the extra boost may just be enough to knock this back and out so Beacon Hills and Beacon County would be safe from this one. 

He doesn’t have his jeep with him, he came in on the rig with his team, so he’s a bit short on supplies but he’ll make it work. He gathers some soaked charred plant remains from the far side of the tankers and makes a paste between a big rock and a smaller rock. He doesn’t have supernatural hearing but he hopes Derek’s still keeping everyone busy because he does not want to have to explain to his chief why he’s scratching graffiti into the side of a privately owned truck instead of participating in the briefing. 

He pushes his intentions and his belief into the runes as he pushes the sharp edge of the smaller paste-covered rock into the side of the first tanker truck while murmurring. He dips the rock back into the paste before each rune in the configuration because he knows it’s important to tie the intention physically in something of this scale. If he didn’t think it would get noticed more readily and wiped off he’d finish the whole thing with a big muddy handprint seal of the impacted earth and his blood. As it is, he finishes the configuration and double checks the placements and that everything has some of the ash paste before cutting his thumb open with a corner of the rock and pressing the droplets into the biggest algiz rune in the center and feeling the energy jittering beneath his skin shifting into the tanker, into the massive amount of water there that will douse the flames. It’s working. He feels it working and grins. 

“Stiles,” Derek growls from behind him as he’s pulling away from the first tanker.

“I need like five more minutes,” Stiles says moving to the next truck while Derek glares at his hand and the truck. “It’s going to work, I just need five more minutes.”

Stiles waves a hand at Derek dismissively, he needs to focus and Derek needs to go keep people busy so they don’t start seeing anything that’s going to have them asking questions they don’t want answers to. You can’t unknow the things that Stiles knows. There are scarier things that go bump in the night than werewolves and nature does, in fact, want to kill them all. 

“Boyd’s got them occupied. You have time, I just- blood.” Derek can’t word good right now, it seems.

Stiles takes that to mean he smelled the blood, somehow. He's so hyper-aware of Stiles it's suffocating at times. Like now, when he needs to finish this and needs it to really work. Stiles doesn’t want to have to deal with an overprotective alpha werewolf right now but he takes a deep calming breath in and turns to Derek, “Blood strengthens the spellwork. These tankers are huge and they needed the boost to work. If Erica was here I’d have her clearcoat these to get them to hold a bit longer but I think they’ll last for at least this one-off use. That one’s good to go, just let me focus on getting this one done and maybe we can all go home sometime today.”

He doesn’t stop to see Derek’s response before turning around and recreating the rune configuration from the other truck. After repeating the whole process, he does his other thumb for this seal and sees Derek flinch in his periphery like he’s never seen Stiles bleed before. Just as with the other truck he feels the pulse of the energy flowing from him into the configuration, to the truck and its contents and it glows briefly before settling. 

If nobody looks too closely, they probably won’t notice them but Mr. Whittmore might still get dinged on the rental fee for the markings. Stiles can’t bring himself to care, suddenly more exhausted than before. He nods and backs up, accidentally backing into Derek who’s closer now than he thought he was before. 

“They’re good. Let’s get this shit done.” Stiles says, wiping his hands on his pants and making to pull his face mask back on.

Derek stops him, “We’ve got it. Go clean those up at the truck before they get infected. Do you need stitches?”

Stiles opens his mouth to protest but Derek cuts him off with a shoulder nudge before he walks away, “I’m not above texting Scott.”

“No! You know he’s a mother hen! Ugh,” he grumbles on the way back to his rig to get the first aid kit out. 

He’s rinsing and sanitizing, wrapping a 2x2 gauze with some transpore tape, because of course they’re out of bandaids and this is going to suck to shove back into his gloves but whatever, when he sees Derek and Boyd directing the remaining tankers to the front. He does not want Scott convincing his partner Kira to drive their unit all the way out here for bandaids or freaking out about stitches and he knows that’s exactly what will happen if Derek texts him. He does not need stitches.

Scott once dragged Stiles to the ER when he twisted an ankle on a joint drill because apparently, even though he deals with injured humans every day, an injured Stiles makes him panic and drag Stiles to Melissa without fail even if all he needs is an ice pack. On another occasion, Scott had literally had a complicated fracture, bone sticking right out of his forearm and everything, but had gotten Stiles to the ER parking lot driving one-handed after Stiles had become overly well acquainted with a tree at great velocity thanks to a troll before Stiles told him his concussion wasn’t as big of a deal as getting Scott’s arm set right so it could heal correctly. Stiles had thrown a clean hoodie over it and Melissa dragged them into an empty room to scold them both and patch them up. 

Scott’s arm did heal before Stiles’ concussion resolved but still, he’d prioritized a head bump over actual bones so Stiles tries not to let Scott know when he’s hurt. Besides, two little nicks on his thumbs isn’t exactly bleeding out. He's not hurt, he's fine. He’s actually surprised Derek had smelled the blood from across the field. He’s fine, Scott doesn’t need to come. Stiles has work to do here.

***

His team is in much better spirits when he rejoins them. It’s working. The boosted water is working just as well as the boosted hydrant water works in town when they use it on fire calls. He doesn’t even care that Derek’s likely to get all the credit for strategically knocking back the fire because he’s not in this for the glory. He just wants his people, his home, and his shop to be safe and he’s got no way to explain his role in the water lasting longer than it should and extinguishing the flames like none of the other trucks before had managed. 

When they’re wrapping up, loading all the gear back into their respective rigs, Stiles isn’t expecting anything but a nice ride back to the station. He is so glad he’s not a driver. He is tired, he’s gross, he needs to go hose down his gear and shower forever. 

Jackson Whittemore appears from seemingly nowhere to lean smirking against the truck while Stiles is double-checking that all the latches are closed before they head out, “Good work, Stilinski.”

“We all do our parts,” Stiles says non-committally. He never knows what to make of his tough love brolationship with Jackson but it’s been like this since kindergarten and at this point he’s too deep to attempt to clarify. Jackson’s in Derek’s pack but he works at the District Attorney’s office and has literally no reason to be out at the cleanup up of a fire call. “Thank your dad for the water tankers, by the way. They really made all the difference.”

“Yeah, that was all that made the difference,” Jackson laughs, rolling his eyes. “I think I may have given him the idea that altruism was good PR for his firm and that they might be tax-deductible but I’m not his accountant so who knows. Boyd and I will drive them back to town. Should we buff out your additions before we return them or will they help next time the trucks get used?”

“Don’t you need a CDL to drive those?” Stiles says, ignoring that last question for now.

“I have many talents,” Jackson muses, earning a look from Stiles. “Fine. So I lost a bet in college and then had to go through the whole ridiculous process. Fortunately for you, I have a CDL now and I brought you more water than the county could get their hands on. You’re welcome.”

“Thank you, Jackson. Really.” Stiles says. “Careful on the curve by Leavenworth, that’s gotta suck in trucks that big.”

“Yeah, yeah says the guy who does not have the license to drive a big rig,” Jackson says, looks back over at Boyd leaning against a tanker and back to Stiles. “So, are we buffing out your scribbles or what?”

“I kind of made them specific for this, they probably won’t work once they go through the wash so you may as well buff ‘em. I could re-juice them if we needed more for this call but they lasted well enough that they served their purpose.”

“Cool, go shower then. You’re rank.” Jackson calls over his shoulder as he heads back toward Boyd.

Stiles rolls his eyes and climbs up into his rig, ready to go. Jerry is behind the wheel and eyes Stiles as if to ask that everybody’s onboard and good to go. 

He leans his head down on Jerry’s shoulder, “Take me home, Jeeves.”

Jerry shakes his head in exasperation and takes them back to the station. Stiles is an acquired taste but thankfully he’s been around long enough that Jerry gets him enough to not be offended. It probably also helps that Jerry went to school with Stiles' parents and has pseudo-adopted Stiles as a son when he's at the fire station. 

***

He sleeps straight through the next day, which is fine because he’s his own boss so he can't get in trouble for not showing up, but he’s absolutely starving when he opens up the shop Monday morning. He had slept in, despite the lengthy sleep the day before, and didn’t have time to grab anything. He hadn’t really been grocery shopping in the week prior as he’d been otherwise engaged in making sure they didn’t all burn to death and burn down a magical tree on top of it all so he didn’t even have bread handy for a quick slice of toast.

Whatever, he’d figure it out once he got caught up in the shop. He had notes on the door for missed FedEx and UPS deliveries from the week, special orders and routine crap stock for the hippie shops to prepare, and probably a week’s worth of voicemails and emails that were hopefully not urgent to catch up on. It’s while he’s sifting through all of that that he hears the jingle of the bell above the door and when he looks up it’s Derek with a coffee in one hand and a paper bag from the hipster bakery in the other.

Stiles looks up to the heavens as if asking for strength, or patience, or something, before returning his gaze to Derek. “Can the forces of evil not give us a vacation? A staycation even? I don't even want to travel anywhere. I just want a freaking nap. What’s it this time then, big bad?”

“Um,” Derek says and Stiles can’t help but notice the pink tinge to the tips of his ears, “it’s just breakfast.”

Stiles is honestly shocked at this. Speechless. His mouth is gaping open like a fish. Derek just puts the coffee and the bag down on a slightly less cluttered spot on the counter.

“Pour over with two sugars and a ham and cheese croissant,” Derek says, not stepping back from the counter though it looks as if he’d rather be anywhere else but here right now.

“Breakfast?” Stiles repeats back at him, scandalized. “Derek Hale, you never grace my shop with your presence unless you need research done. Now breakfast?”

“You had a long week. And it’s the least I could do.” His words kind of seemed like they were saying thank you but his eyebrows seem conflicted about Stiles’ continued existence.

“Ah, yes, Jackson did text me that your theatrics were getting you promoted. Party Friday and all that. You’re welcome Captain Hale, but you don’t owe me breakfast. I’ll eat it,” Stiles says, snatching it up like he thinks Derek’s going to take it back, “but you don’t _owe_ me breakfast. I would’ve tried to do the same whether you were there or not, having you there just made it easier to get everybody out of the way so I guess thank you for that. I am not buying you breakfast though, you make more than I do.”

Derek’s blush travels to the tops of his cheeks at that but he doesn’t say anything while Stiles makes absolute heart eyes at his coffee when he takes the first sips with a loving sigh. 

“Ah, my lifeblood, how I have missed you,” Stiles croons to his coffee like he’s speaking to a beloved baby. After another sip he shifts his attention back to Derek, “So, you’ve had a busy week too. I didn’t see you til the end of all that but I’m sure I would’ve heard from Scott earlier in the week if anything else was afoot. Don’t worry, I already thanked the universe for not double fucking us with an unknown supernatural shit show while I was out dealing with all that. I don’t know how your pack would survive without me sometimes, but thankfully it’s not something they’ll ever have to worry about.”

Derek’s face looks like he’s confused, constipated, or both. What he says is slightly strangled sounding, “My pack?”

“Yeah, your pack. You know? Boyd, Erica, Scott, Jackson, Lydia, Parrish… your pack. They’re all kinda stuck with me whether you like it or not because I’d never let anything happen to them or to this town for as long as I can help it.” Stiles wants to savor his coffee but instead, he slurps it down and closes his eyes as the last of the blissful flavor slips away.

“Stiles, I brought you breakfast,” Derek says like that has anything to do with anything. He continues speaking nonsense while Stiles is drowning in a backlog of work, “I’m not sure what you mean by ‘whether I like it or not’ because I don’t exactly make a habit of dropping off breakfast for the rest of the pack. I know I can come off a certain way but I didn’t think you- you know you’re different to me right?”

“Yeah, I know. Me human, you big bad wolf. You have your pack and I’m the personal librarian.” Stiles huffs. He marks his delivery preference responses on the FedEx and UPS notices and pops them back out on the door. When he goes to slide back behind the counter Derek stops him with a gentle hand grasping his arm.

“Stiles,” Derek says like just that one word says so many things at once. 

Stiles is not awake enough to discern them, he’s only just had his first cup of coffee which hasn't had a chance to kick in yet, and he isn’t in any impending danger if Derek’s not here for research so he really needs to catch up on his to-do list which he can almost do on autopilot if Derek would let him get back to it. Why was he being so weird today?

“Stiles, you stopped a wildfire with your magic. You do that a lot; you stop things from hurting people whether it's with your plans, your research, or your spark. I’ve seen the hydrants around town but I didn’t know what it was until this weekend. You show up for us, for me, all the time, even when I tell you not to because it’s dangerous for you. _We_ have a pack, Stiles. It’s not my pack, it never was only mine. It’s _our_ pack. And if there has ever been a doubt in your mind about that then I’m an even bigger asshole than everybody always tells me I am.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” Derek says, watching the gears turning in Stiles’ head like maybe he's starting to catch on here.

“But Deaton said-”

“Deaton was my mother’s emissary. He’s never been mine.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Stiles says again because that wasn’t where he was going with that but that’s a whole other layer on the what the fuck is happening right now cake. Derek just re-framed the last decade of Stiles’ life and now that he looks at it in that way, he can see it and he feels like an idiot.

But his research on pack dynamics and his conversations with Deaton were fairly clear in Alphas only trusting pack safety, training, and leadership like that with an alpha mate. Deaton is cryptic, and neither he or his sister seem capable of ever giving straight answers about anything, but they would have said something if that pertained to him. Stiles may be a spark but nowhere in his learning was it ever hinted that he had mate potential. He was fairly certain werewolves only felt a mate pull with other werewolves, or at the very least other supernaturals. Do sparks count as supernaturals in that instance? If Derek was trying to tell him that the pack was _their_ pack, and he meant it that way, is he trying to say he’s had a mate for a decade and not done anything about it? Granted, he'd been 16 when Derek had come back to town but he'd been legal for eight going on nine years and Stiles never thought their mutual snark was anything at the level of connectedness that he's starting to grasp now. He hadn't wanted to read too much into it before. He'd always given Derek a wide berth because of his history, he didn't need Stiles drooling all over him he needed Stiles to be useful so he was.

“So, in all of our conversations, you never felt like that’s a thing I might need to know? Was I just supposed to read between the lines and figure that out?” He says finally, after a pause in which his brain had blue screened and rebooted.  
  
“You always read between the lines! With everything with Laura, Peter, Scott, and the others I thought you’d know. I thought you knew.” Derek says looking stricken like maybe he’d somehow considered Stiles an integral member of his pack for as long as he’d been alpha and realizing that Stiles never considered himself pack is physically painful to him. “This whole time, I thought you knew and you just had boundaries and I was okay respecting them, having you however I was allowed to.”

Nothing’s allowed to hurt his pack, especially if that thing is him, and right now Derek is looking like somebody died. Stiles takes a deep breath and rests his palm over Derek’s heart and closes his eyes. He feels the energy coming from Derek and latches onto it with enthusiastic consent, feels the pack bond settle firmly into place the way it should have always been between them. 

“We need to work on your communication skills, asshole. You think you know all about it, then it seems you’re wrong,” Stiles says with a smile that tempers the heat of his words. 

Derek looks awed, like he didn’t know it could feel like this with Stiles even though he knows he can feel pack bonds to his betas, even with Parrish and Lydia. But this feels different, judging by the expressions his face is cycling through now.

“We are bound to each other’s hearts. I’m your emissary. I am pack.” Stiles declares quietly, as much to himself as to Derek.

“And?” Derek asks just as quietly, placing a hand tentatively over Stiles’ on his heart like the total sap he apparently is. 

“And I expect to see you in here more often than just supernatural research, to see you more in general. Not just training, not just pack meetings, not just throwdowns with whatever rolls into the territory, not just at mutual aid fire calls. And we’ll figure it out.” Stiles turns his hand around to grasp Derek’s and give it a squeeze. “I’m still not buying you breakfast. I could buy you dinner later if that’s agreeable?”

“Yes,” Derek’s smile lights up the whole room. “Dinner would be great. What time?”

Stiles looks around and his brain returns to reality, “Ugh, probably late. I have a week worth of shit to sift through here. Is seven too late?”

“Not at all. Is 7:45 okay? I’ve got shift handoff til 7:30. I’m technically 7-7 days but you know shift report always takes longer than that.”

“7:45 would be perfect,” Stiles says eyeing the blinking light on his answering machine for the gazillionth time that morning before a thought occurs to him. “Wait a minute. If you’re still on days then what were you doing at my call this weekend? It had to have been close to 9pm by the time you guys got on scene.”

Derek’s blush had been fading but it’s back now and he does not look like words will be forthcoming.

“Derek?”

“Boyd’s in charge of our engine most nights but when we finally got the extra tankers, Mr. Whittemore may have exerted his influence to allocate specific county personnel to the call out.” At Stiles raised eyebrows Derek continues, “You’d been there all week, your dad said you’d barely been home. We wanted to help but we were tied down by bureaucracy until we weren’t. You’re pack and it was a threat to our territory. We didn’t think it would take so long but it eventually worked out. You shouldn’t’ve been the only one fighting that fire all week.”

“You saw the response, Derek. I wasn’t the only one. There were dozens of other volunteers who were out there in shifts all week too. It took all of us to make a difference. You just happened to swoop in all taut muscles and rugged charm just in time to direct the final efforts to success.” Stiles gives his hand another squeeze before gently shoving him towards the door. “This is a place of business, if you actually want to get dinner sometime today you’d better let me get to it. Also, you’re very late for night's shift handoff.”

“Chief loves me, and I’m on break.” Derek snarks but does make his way to the door. “See you later.”

“Adios, amigo,” Stiles says, ducking back behind the counter and refusing to look back up at Derek. If he does, he knows he’s just going to get dragged back into the thousand questions he has right now but he’s an actual adult and has shit to do. So the thousand questions will have to come out over dinner later. Or more likely, he'll skim his messages to make sure nobody's dying and then he'll dive into his own research spiral before dinner because apparently he's been slacking. He's an emissary and apparently an alpha mate, and he's got some learning to catch up on. He's going to woo the hell out of Derek Hale, but first he's gonna demolish the delicious croissant his mate dropped off to him. 

**Author's Note:**

> There are actual fires raging in Australia right now and no magical water tankers to stop them. Find out how you can help [here](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-to-help-the-victims-of-australias-wildfires).
> 
> Gender reveal parties _have_ caused wildfires, although not the California fires, to my knowledge that’s usually PG&E, but definitely caused [the $8 million dollar wildfire in Arizona](https://fortune.com/2018/11/28/gender-reveal-arizona-fire/) that destroyed 45,000 acres and took 799 firefighters to put out. Anatomy scans tell anatomy, not gender, and y'all don't need to be blowing up pink and blue everywhere over genitals. 
> 
> September 2020 update to the end notes courtesy of [Dylan O'Brien himself](https://twitter.com/dylanobrien/status/1303049514677280768?s=12), "Can gender reveal parties stop being a thing now?" following yet another massive wildfire caused by a gender reveal party here in the US. My house smells like a campfire and my city is filled with smoke. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


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